On Wednesday, Manolo Blahnik celebrated their 50th anniversary with an intimate soirée at the Carlyle. Inside the famed hotel’s Dowling’s restaurant, guests were greeted with champagne before nestling into the cozy space, comfortable and reminiscent of a friend’s home, for high tea on a brisk fall afternoon.
That same feeling of familiarity and ease is something the Spanish designer has spent the last five decades hoping to achieve amongst his clientele. “If you could come into the shop and have a good time, [Manolo Blahnik]’s really happy. The shop on Madison Avenue is the biggest we have, but he wants it to feel like a living room, and if you happen to fall in love with a pair of shoes, that’s fabulous,” Andrew Wright, President and CCO of Manolo Blahnik explained.
The afternoon anniversary event drew friends of the brand, old and new, who gathered to celebrate the momentous occasion. Sandra Bernhard, Erinn Westbrook, Veronica Webb, Julia Schlaepfer, Jacquelyn Jablonski, Eniko Mihilk, Melodie Monrose, Amy Fine Collins, Jihae Kim, and Nicky Hilton Rothschild mingled as the minds at Manolo Blahnik unveiled fifty years of awe-inspiring design in the form of a digital archive entitled “A New Way of Walking.”
As guests tucked into artfully arranged displays of finger sandwiches, scones, and macarons, Wright waxed poetic about Blahnik’s creative genius while showcasing how users can glide through five virtual rooms in the archive to observe the brilliance of Blahnik’s creations in digital form. The room filled with anecdotes about Blahnik, like his process behind designing the footwear for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It was not a matter of designing for film, but “as if Marie Antoinette walked into his shop, on Old Church Street and said, ‘I want a fabulous pair of shoes. Design them for me!’’’ to illustrate the dedication the man has to his craft.
Manolo is an artist first, Wright told me, “it could have equally been painting, it could have been sculpture, it could have been architecture, but all of those elements are in his shoes, if you think about it.” While Blahnik himself owns somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 pairs of shoes, within the digital showcase you’ll find original sketches of the designer’s most precious pieces, including some never before seen like selections from a new shoppable gold capsule collection to commemorate the brand’s anniversary.
His presentation ended with a toast to 50 golden years and Blahnik himself, who Wright called the “leading light.” A sense of deep, genuine camaraderie that Blahnik has built throughout his career could be felt with every clink of a glass. Emerging from one of the tables was Krysta Rodriguez who starred spectacularly as Liza Minelli in Netflix’s Halston, promising to keep it “light, fun, and jazzy,” as her velvety voice serenaded attendees with Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” Etta James’s “At Last,” and once again Sinatra, wrapping up her performance with “(Theme From) New York, New York.”
While Manolo Blahnik is one of many designers with an extensive archive, what makes this extra special is its accessibility to the public. “The 50th was around the corner and we thought, how are we going to celebrate this moment? We needed something that’s going to remain and go on and on. And then we thought let’s do something online, everybody’s online. We’ve been a very closed, hidden company, so this is a way of peeling back the layers behind the man and his inspiration,” Wright said of the decision.
While high tea may seem antiquated in a world where the metaverse is nearing ubiquity and questions about whether digital material possession, a seemingly contradictory phrase until NFTs exploded into the zeitgeist, begin to probe industry innovators as we think about the future of fashion, Manolos Blahnik’s debut of their virtual archive proved that the digital sphere will be the medium that melds modernism and heritage—a word Blahnik himself is not quite fond of, Wright explained. “He’s in the moment, [a Manolo shoe] is still as current as it is today as it was twenty-two years ago. They don’t die because they are not trying to be today. They are just trying to be beautiful,” he said. This outlook, neither on the pulse or behind it but floating in its own realm, is what allows Manolo Blahnik a sort of immortality.
As virtual fashion continues to make strides, I inquired if the brand planned to delve deep into this space, and Wright asserted that the future might one day include digital shoes. “We have lots of stocklists, but we don’t have stand-alone shops but 23,” he says. “The idea of being in Johannesburg or Buenos Aires where we don’t have a shop and actually being able to try the shoes on virtually would be lovely.”
All this to say, Manolo might once again invent a new way of walking.
— Inside the Sudden Disappearance of the Art World’s Most Wanted Man
— The Guy Who Bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Jet Has Some Regrets
— Eight Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month
— Why Did the Palace Initially Keep the Queen’s Hospital Stay a Secret?
— The John Mulaney–Olivia Munn Rumor Mill Keeps Churning
— The Best Schitt’s Creek Merchandise
— The Story Behind Prince Harry’s Democratic Roots
— This Is 40 for Ivanka Trump
— From the Archive: In Her Majesty’s Private Service
— Sign up for “The Buyline” to receive a curated list of fashion, books, and beauty buys in one weekly newsletter.